


coming through in waves

by glorious_spoon



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-21
Updated: 2011-02-21
Packaged: 2017-10-18 08:25:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/186911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They both have nightmares now. Sam h/c, general spoilers for S6.</p>
            </blockquote>





	coming through in waves

Sam comes awake with a start, scream catching in the back of his throat. He can't remember the content of his dream, but the lingering sickness of it remains, a screaming invisible horror crouched in the pit of his mind.

"You okay?" Dean asks, and that's when Sam realizes that he's awake too, sitting up in bed with his laptop open and a bottle of whiskey on the nightstand between them. Battling nightmares of his own, maybe. He still has them.

"Yeah," Sam mutters. "I'm fine."

There’s a bottle of pills on the nightstand as well. On his side of the nightstand. The lid is still on; these weren’t for Dean.

His pride wants to protest, but it’s late and he’s shaky with exhaustion and it feels like his sanity is dangling by a single fragile thread. He feels the way Dean looked two years ago. Three years ago now. He keeps forgetting that lapse of time, and it comes back to bite him at the oddest moments.

Dean always stepped down the rabbit hole first-- _’cause I’m older, Sammy_ \--but Sam’s always followed. Sooner or later, he’s always followed. To hell and back, literally.

The bottle has a child safety cap on it, and Sam’s fingers feel slick and clumsy, fumbling and fumbling until a steadier hand closes over his. Dean uncaps the bottle and shakes two of the pills into his palm, then hands them to Sam and screws the cap back on without looking him in the face. Sam is unspeakably grateful for that. He doesn’t know if he’ll see fear or pity or guilt or some horrible combination of the three in his brother’s eyes, and right now he can’t deal with any of it.

He pops the pills dry, reaches for the whiskey to wash them down, and that’s when Dean finally speaks. “No. Bad idea, trust me. Here.”

He hands over a bottle of water. It’s lukewarm and slightly metallic on Sam’s tongue, but he chugs half of it anyway before screwing the cap back on. His hands feel steadier already, his mind less like a thing made up of broken glass, and he chances a smile. It feels like plastic on his face. “Dean, you’ve been taking codeine with a Jack Daniels chaser since you were in high school.”

“This ain’t codeine.” Dean finally looks him in the eye. He looks mostly tired, a little concerned. “Trust me, dude. Stay away from the hard stuff for at least a couple of hours.”

Sam eyes the bottle. “What is it?”

“You don’t really want to know. Picked it up from some witch-doctor friend of Bobby’s a while back. Does the trick, though. You feel better?”

“Yeah,” Sam mutters. It’s even true, more or less. He doesn’t feel like he’s going to fall apart or start screaming in the immediate future, anyway. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Dean says. The tone is gentle, but he doesn’t push, for a change. Dad’s notebook is open next to his knee, and his face is lit by the pale glow of the laptop screen. He’s chewing on the cap of a Bic pen and squinting a little; Sam thinks he probably needs glasses, though he knows better to say so out loud.

It’s a familiar image. Dean is getting older, and time has changed him in small ways that are each insignificant in and of themselves and enormous in concert, but he’s still Dean. He still sprawls the same way. He still sneaks cigarettes like he thinks Sam won’t smell it on him and chews pens when he’s thinking. He’s a familiar piece of reality for Sam to anchor his fragile sanity on.

It’s a long several moments of quiet, during which Dean doesn’t throw the pen at his head or tell him to stop staring, before Sam finally rolls up onto his elbow. “What are you working on?”

His voice must come out normal, because Dean tosses him the journal instead of telling him to go back to sleep and mind his own business. “So there’s this hedge maze in some horticultural garden down in North Carolina--”

“You know what a horticultural garden is?” Sam interrupts.

Dean grins. “Shut up. Anyway, it looks like something’s eating people there. Couple of groundskeepers found hoof prints around the bodies.”

“Horse?”

“Cow. And it looks like it was walking on two legs.”

“A minotaur.” Sam groans. “You have got to be kidding me.”

“Any idea how to kill one?”

“Well, Theseus had to wrestle it before he could behead it--”

“--dude, I am not going all Hulk Hogan on a freaking bull-headed cannibal. What else?”

“I’m not sure.” Sam turns a page in the journal. The sketched illustration is Dad’s, but his notes were brief; most of the writing is Dean’s large, blocky script. Not all of it is in English. “Is this Greek?”

Dean shrugs, a slow, indifferent motion, but when Sam glances up, there’s a flush rising in his cheeks and his expression is defensive. “Picked up a little here and there. Figure we could cross-check it with whatever Bobby has on this thing, make sure we get it right this time.”

“You just _picked up_ a little ancient Greek?”

“Yeah, well.” Dean rubs the bridge of his nose, glances at Sam, then back down at his laptop screen. “I spent most of a year digging around for anything I could find that might pull you out. They don’t exactly do standard translations of most of that shit. I took notes. It’s no big deal.”

“Dean, I--” Sam looks down again. A lump is knotting itself into his throat, and he swallows it down with difficulty. “Your grammar is terrible, you know that?”

Dean relaxes, marginally. “Oh, bite me.”

“No, seriously, didn’t anyone ever teach you the difference between indicative and imperative? And look at this, here--”

Dean rolls his eyes and sits up, shifting the computer off his lap. “Since you’re up, you can take over. I think my eyes are gonna start bleeding.”

“You need glasses,” Sam says, reaching over to disentangle the laptop’s power cord from Dean’s sheets. Dean pauses in the middle of a stretch to glare at him, and Sam grins back. “You’re getting old. I think I saw a gray hair the other day.”

“Whatever. Chicks dig silver foxes.” Dean reaches for the crumpled jeans he kicked to the foot of his bed earlier and tugs them on. “Lobby has a coffee pot, I’m gonna grab a cup. You want anything?”

“Nah,” Sam murmurs, leaning over to plug the power cord in. “I’m good.”

“You sure?”

Sam smiles. “I’m sure. Thanks."

"Whatever," Dean says again. He reaches out to tousle Sam's hair roughly as he passes. "Don't fuck up my computer, bitch."


End file.
